UK Telecoms: Huawei

David Drew Excerpts

Thursday 25th April 2019 Commons Chamber

[Jeremy Wright]

I am grateful to my hon. Friend, whose experience is valuable in this discussion. He is right that we must also consider the competition aspects, not just from an economic point of view, but from a security point of view. It is obviously better to have a number of different suppliers, not just because it helps with the economics, but because it makes the network more secure. The difficulty, as he will recognise, is that essentially there are only three suppliers in this space: Huawei, Nokia and Ericsson. There are difficulties, on a number of levels, with the assumption that were we to exclude Huawei and rely entirely on the other two suppliers, we would have a safe network as a result. That is not the right assumption to make. That is why the review process is more complex than it might initially appear to be.

[Dr David Drew (Stroud) (Lab/Co-op)]

As well as the current controversy over safety and security, there is another aspect to this: the safety of human health. Will the Secretary of State assure me that whatever company he chooses as the main contractor will have to take full account of the impact on human health and ensure that any infrastructure minimises any possible danger to human health?

[Jeremy Wright]

Of course that is important, and the hon. Gentleman will know that colleagues in the Department of Health and Social Care are working on this. Whatever use we make of this technology and whoever supplies it, it is important that human health considerations are taken into account.